Barry Hindess

To many of my generation, the name Barry Hindess first appeared as a co-author of a series of trenchant theoretical texts associated with structural Marxism and the reception, critique and revaluation of the work of Louis Althusser and of Marx himself. Many years before I met him, his name was associated with taking social and political theory extremely seriously, with a close and forensic reading of texts, and with an unremitting intellectual radicality that, in an early manifestation, sought to provide new foundations for the social sciences. As a first-year PhD student, I recall enthusiastically clutching copies of the two volumes of Marx’s Capital and Capitalism Today (Cutler, Hindess, Hirst and Hussain, 1977/1978) in a supervision session with my freshly imported English supervisor of professorial rank. For my effort, I received his comment to the effect, ‘how can you be bothered with their work, when they change their mind with every book?’ I must say I was shocked by what I perceived as blatant anti-intellectualism. Barry and his colleagues, particularly Paul Hirst, had taught me that theory – or, let’s simply say, living with and using concepts – was so important that one should be able not only to criticise others and oneself but also to do so without malice or this kind of sheer gratuitousness too often found in the academy.

Despite his mid-career change of professorial chair at the ANU from sociology to political science, Barry remains for me a social theorist or at least one of those for whom there is no fundamental distinction between social and political theory. I recently discovered that the first ever paper published in Economy and Society was one by Barry that criticizes Alfred Schutz’s ‘phenomenological’ sociology (Hindess, 1972). Thirty-five years later he was in the first issue of the European Journal of Social Theory (Hindess, 2007), another important venue for social theory, on international citizenship. The social-theoretical interest was apparently abiding: there is a brief but incisive review of a biography of Karl Polyani published this year (Hindess, 2018). Certainly, Barry’s brilliant book, Discourses of Power (1996), had plenty of classical political theory in it including Hobbes and Locke, but it also examined Parsons, the Frankfurt School, Lukes, C. Wright Mills, and, above all, Foucault.

I actually met Barry in the early 1990s at Macquarie University, where I was introduced by Christine Helliwell, his life-partner and, later, writing partner, who at the time occupied a neighbouring office. After this, we spent many hours in conversation in the cafes of Leichhardt, where he lived, often talking about Foucault and the nascent scholarship on governmentality and plans of one kind or another. Barry was clearly interested in this new field and would become a major contributor to it, but thankfully never in an uncritical way. This was particularly the case with regard to the Anglo-Foucault who would somehow flourish in Thatcher’s UK, less in sociology than in accounting departments and later in critical management studies in business schools. Barry was sceptical of both conventional liberal narratives and the Anglo-Foucauldian narrative of liberalism, often pointing to the vacuity of claims that contemporary liberalism was a form of ‘governing through freedom’ and emphasizing the degree to which liberalism was just as much a form of governing of ‘unfreedom’. There are clearly links to his latter concerns with empire, temporality, citizenship, the differential treatments of populations, and global governance and transparency. Barry was annoyed when a paper to this effect was denied publication in a major journal to which he had contributed on many occasions and with which he had a long, if somewhat difficult, history. Fortunately, it would be published elsewhere (Hindess, 2001). I recall a conference in Helsinki in the summer of 2000 where Barry, English Foucauldian, Nikolas Rose, Foucault’s Italian student, Giovanna Procacci, and myself, were among the plenary speakers. I felt at the time that he and I were intellectually close as antipodeans emphasizing questions of sovereignty, the state, liberal authoritarianism, and the treatment of indigenous, colonized and poor populations, and refusing the grand narratives of ever new and more immanent forms of life-politics in contemporary liberal democracies. There was at that point still a debate to be had but I imagine that, after the less than joyful internecine Marxist wars of the 1970s, Barry did not have the heart for another one, and our interlocutors appeared happy to ignore alternative views rather than engage with them. Undoubtedly, what came to be called ‘governmentality studies’ would have been better off for it.

By then, we had already held a conference on ‘Governing Australia’ in the State Library of New South Wales and from it published an anthology of work using Foucault and governmentality in Australian contexts (Dean and Hindess, 1998). My memory of the collaboration was that it was professional and smooth. Barry was extremely easy-going as a collaborator, and immensely helpful whenever you shared work with him. Around that time, I was also lucky enough to be a visiting fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences at ANU where Barry was Professor of Political Science and had the role of Head of Department, which he appeared to perform dutifully and extremely efficiently. More importantly, under Barry, the place was a hub of considerable intellectual excitement, and during the one semester there we had the opportunity to hear, socialize and dialogue with people as diverse as William Connolly, Jane Bennett, John (J.G.A.) Pocock, and James Tully, not to mention the group of PhD students clustered around and inspired by Barry.

In later years, the meetings were more occasional, and apart from the too infrequent social occasions, dinners and visits, they seemed to come in odd places: Montreal, Deakin (for the volume which would be his festschrift published in Alternatives in 2011), and most strange of all, Jerusalem. On every occasion, I felt immediately closely connected to him and that the project born in the 1990s and somehow crystallized in the debates, or the non-debates, in Helsinki was still active and ready to be recommenced. Alas, his death has finally extinguished that tiny hope.

In Jerusalem, we spent the best part of a week wandering the old city together. This was not easy because Barry, recovering from a recent medical event, was using a walking stick and as a consequence was highly restricted. It turned out that extremely slow movement was a perfect way to see the place. We visited the sites of the three Abrahamic religions literally piled on top of one another. I remember that we spoke with an Arab boy who found Barry’s Australian five-dollar note strange and ran off to ensure it could be exchanged for something more valuable before coming back ten minutes later and thanking him after we had proceeded only a few paces. Our hosts took us to the security Wall, to the settlements, to checkpoints, to sites of the Intifada, and to the Dead Sea. It was in January and there was the remnant of snow on the graves that line the hill from which the old city arises. We found our way to at least one bar in East Jerusalem that predated the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, and laboured up the stairs to the old Viennese café atop one of the Stations of the Cross. I do not think I am wrong when I say that Barry was not at all religious, and he seemed to have absolutely no time for the rediscovery of theology in radical thought. However, I do recall a long conversation we had there in what was said to be the Garden of Gethsemane. We were alone save for a gardener pruning the bushes in the bright winter sun. Perhaps inspired by some sense of place, we spoke about the ordeal in human existence, something Barry’s intellectual and more recent medical biography had more than fully equipped him to comment on. If I remember Barry well, it is as in that garden, as someone who faced his travails with equanimity and calmness and without resort to the transcendent. The expression that I associate with him when he complained of anything was simply that it was ‘a bit of a pain’.

I have neglected to mention that Barry was kind, gentle, helpful and tolerant to those who knew him, which contrasted with his often stringent, sceptical and exacting thought. We were extremely lucky that Barry came to Australia, liked the placed and made it his home. He did so without a trace of condescension that somehow seems to cling still to the habitus of many academic Brits in Australia, and became in his own way as antipodean as any of us. He helped us to think, to stand on our still wobbly colonial feet, and to contribute as equals to a world we could never have imagined we were ready to fully join.